In April 1982, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band assembled at Power Station studio in midtown Manhattan to recored the follow-up to the New Jersey singer/songwriter's Billboard chart-topping fifth album, The River. Springsteen had already demoed the songs at home on a four-track Tascam 144 portastudio and was excited to flesh the sparse acoustic recordings out with his crack collaborators.
"The songs were the opposite of the rock music I'd been writing," he recalled in his 2016 memoir Born To Run. "They were restrained, still on the surface, with a world of moral ambiguity and unease below. The tension running through the music's core was the thin line between stability and that moment when the things that connect you to your world, your job, your family, your friends, the love and grace in your heart, fail you. I wanted to the music to feel like a waking dream and to move like poetry. I wanted the blood in these songs to feel destined and fateful."
After two months in the studio, in June 1982 Springsteen began mixing both the acoustic and full-band sessions.
"I had these two extremely different recording experiences going," he told MOJO magazine in 1999. "I was going to put them out at the same time as a double record. I didn't know what to do."
Ultimately, Springsteen decided that the full band recordings were not how he wanted this batch of songs presented to the world.
"On listening, I realized I'd succeeded in doing nothing but damaging what I'd created," he wrote in Born To Run. "We got it to sound cleaner, more hi-fi, but not nearly as atmospheric, as authentic."
In a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg said that the electric versions of Nebraska "was all very hard-edged."
"As great as it was," he recalled, "it wasn't what Bruce wanted to release."
Now, in a new interview with The Times, Weinberg says that he hopes that the "kick-ass" electric sessions songs will emerge one day.
“There’s been this myth that they weren’t well played but we played the hell out of them," he insists. "I know the songs were recorded, the tracks are there, so I hope one day Electric Nebraska does make the light of day.”
While the wait for that album continues, Springsteen fans will be blessed in June with the release ofTracks II: The Lost Albums, a set of seven complete, unheard, Springsteen records made between 1983 and 2018, boasting 74 never-before-heard songs.
“The Lost Albums were full records, some of them even to the point of being mixed and not released,” Springsteen said last month. “I’ve played this music to myself and often close friends for years now. I’m glad you’ll get a chance to finally hear them. I hope you enjoy them.”
“I often read about myself in the 1990s as having some ‘lost period,'” he added in a promo video for the box set. “Not really. I was working the whole time.”
"I’ve heard everything and I think the fans are going to love it," Max Weinberg tells The Times. "There is one album [Inyo] Bruce played me where he utilised a mariachi band of musicians, Hispanic musicians. It was just incredible, incredible music."
